Olympiades by Alejandro Elias Garcia Marta

One day walking around the city of Paris, I encountered, by chance, a buildscape called Olympiades.
This space of perfect architectural control and illusionary rendering of an ideal society, created a theatrical, almost surreal experience that could be seen as a mixture of « Blade Runner » and « Metropolis » taken to a point of climax.

Here, the hero is metamorphosed into an apocalyptic figure who turns back into himself, in this case the urban, and imposes a new order totally alien to the existing. The sublime experience described by Burke, where nature creates a kind of terror that surpasses imagination, here becomes a man-made technology of incredible detachment with the territory. It produces a new kind of spatiality that we are still trying to decipher. This new spatiality, that we might call « the space of post-civil society » (Jameson & Speaks, 1990), creates a feeling of controlessness that might resemble a sublime experience of a « second-nature ». At the Olympiades, the agora, the space of the polis, does not drive the traditional identification and order that we usually know, probably due to its inaccessibility and lack of perceptual array. It has been conceived as a « cadavre exquis », in other words as a stratification and overlapping. It contains an internal capsular organization that subverses the perfect control of the plan.
The island, or better said, the archipelago character of this kind of collage buildscape, should not be consider as a urban failure: if we try to look at it with a parallax sense of perspective, it might reveal a hidden potential. The fact that the potential of the ban, the camp or the theme park coexists with the potential of the other, the unknown, the virtual, the new and the subversive, dislocate, deterritorialize and explode into a new urban phenomenon. Welcome to the « new » theatre.
































Pictures and text by Alejandro Elias Garcia Marta